Modernism Quotes - Page 4

• Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

  Edward Weston

  Art, Upheaval, Photographer

  Edward Weston, Peter C. Bunnell, David Featherstone, Robert Adams (1986). “EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston”

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• Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

  Mason Cooley

  Modern, Paint, Depiction

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• Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.

  David G. Hartwell

  Literary Genre, Fiction, Century

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• Modernism probably wouldn't have happened without lesbians in Paris.

  Diana Souhami

  Paris, Happened

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• Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.

  Roger Scruton

  Lying, Secret, Conservatism

  Roger Scruton (2006). “A Political Philosophy”, p.194, A&C Black

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• Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.

  Arthur Erickson

  Artist, Looks, Advantage

  Speech to McGill University School of Architecture, www.arthurerickson.com. October 21, 2000.

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• Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Yesterday, Tomorrow, Forget

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

  Oscar Wilde

  Life, World, Modern

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “An Ideal Husband: Second Edition, Revised”, p.30, A&C Black

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• Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

  Will Self

  Art, Fall, Character

  "Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson - review" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 19, 2012.

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• Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

  Eva Zeisel

  Vocabulary, Curves, Design

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• It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.

  Edgar Friedenberg

  Arrogance, Want, Kind

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• A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.

  Philip Pullman

  Cutting, Ordinary, Doe

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2012.

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• The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

  Roger Scruton

  Wall, Culture, Firsts

  Roger Scruton (2013). “Modern Culture”, p.85, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past

  Roger Scruton

  Past, Hands, Europe

  Roger Scruton (2006). “A political philosophy”, Continuum Intl Pub Group

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• Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Art, Fleeting, Half

  Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.403, CUP Archive

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• Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

  James Fenton

  Art, Names, Quality

  "Negative images" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2002.

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• In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Style, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

  David Hockney

  Photography, Thinking, Europe

  "Interview: “John Tusa Interviews David Hockney” (2004)". Interview with John Tusa, www.americansuburbx.com. May 21, 2009.

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• I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.

  Billy Collins

  Moving, Reading, Writing

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

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• In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.

  R. D. Laing

  Men

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

  Philip Pullman

  Clever, Book, Perfect

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• People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.

  Campbell McGrath

  School, Years, People

  "Campbell McGrath on Poetry, Walt Whitman and Schaefer Beer" by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, www.wsj.com. March 01, 2008.

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• After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.

  Philip Pullman

  Fall, Discovery, Clothes

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• Many with careers in the art world are intimidated, and afraid to speak out against the gospels of Modernist theory.

  Kara Ross

  Art, Speaks Out, Careers

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• A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

  Powerful, Past, Ethos

  "My Dearest Daughter: A letter from the Death Cell". Book by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, p. 15, 2007.

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